Sessions for Standing On The Shoulder of Giants took Oasis as far afield as France, where the group commandeered a chateau owned by Christian Dior. But most of the guitar work was recorded back home in England, either on Noel's bedroom recording rig or in the full-on studio he acquired a while ago."Once you've been in Abbey Road and it's not all it's cracked up to be," he shrugs,"you say, 'Well, where do we go now?' ". Not surprisingly, the vibe is heavily vintage at the guitarist's own studio. "It used to belong to Alvin Lee, from Ten Years After. It's a small studio. The live room is only about 20 by 15. And it's dead: carpets on the ceiling and walls. So it's great for guitar speakers. You can manipulate any guitar tone you want out of there. The equipment is all vintage: an old Studer 1610 multitrack and a Studer quarter-inch mastering machine. I've got an old EMI Mark II board with the big aircraft faders*. I use all EMI preamps, Fairchild and Telefunken compressors. All the outboard gear that we used on the album is vintage - apart from Pro Tools."

Noel seems equally proud of the guitar tracks recorded in his bedroom, which include the album opener, Fuckin' in the Bushes. "There's not one amplifier on that," he proclaims. "It's all through a SansAmp, the little pedal. 'Cuz it was done in my bedroom you see, and all I've got up there is a [mixing] desk and a computer." Session engineer and multi-instrumentalist Paul Stacey played lead guitar on the track. "And the actual guitar we used was a Tokai Stratocaster," Noel marvels. "Paul collects all those kinds of guitars. I went over to his house and said, 'What the fuck is that?' He said, 'Oh man, that's the greatest sounding Strat ever.' I go, 'Bollocks, it's fuckin' red, man. Can't be any good. It's Tokai, man.' He plugged it in, and I go, 'Oh, I see.' A lot of the Seventies stuff that came out of Japan was fucking great. Paul used an Ibanez Flying V for his solo on Roll It Over, and it worked better for that song than my '64 Strat or any of my expensive vintage guitars. That track just needed something a bit 'orrible."

The album's psychedelic guitar tour de force, Who Feels Love?, was also done in Noel's bedroom, with all guitars recorded direct via a SansAmp. Longtime Oasis cohort Mark Coyle played Noel's white Jerry Jones electric sitar. The fluttering, backward textures heard on the track are Pro Tools manipulations of a guitar track played by Paul Stacey. "Paul's a fantastic guitarist," says Noel. "And instead of having the usual obligatory backward notes, I said to him,'Can you do all that stuff on the fretboard? [i.e. tapping] He said, 'Oh yeah.' So we got him doing all that punter, heavy-metal shredding, or whatever you call it, as fast as possible. Then we slowed it down and turned it all backward, and it sounded brilliant. That was quite magical in the studio."

One of Noel's standout guitar moments on the album is his Neil Young-ish lead work on Where Did It All Go Wrong?. "I used the 355 with the whammy bar up, playing through a little Fender Princeton amp," he recalls. "The lead solo was double tracked. It's the same part, but layered maybe three or four times with different tones. When you get that going through the EMI board with the EQ and all, it's just great. It is very Neil Young, yeah." And that's also Noel bashing out the bruising power chords on I Can See A Liar. "That's a black-front '64 Fender Deluxe amp, with the silver cloth," he elaborates. "And the guitar was a yellow TV model Les Paul Junior-the classic punk rock guitar!. That was like, 'Today I will be Steve Jones!' With a bit of AC/DC in there as well. The bass on that is a black Fender Telecaster bass with a mirrored scratch plate [pickguard]. It's an old Sixties model, and it's going through an old Acoustic VS Musician bass rig. That is just pure rock and roll, man. It's Liam's favorite song. I didn't want to have it on the album at first, because I think it's too much of a Be Here Now track. But because it's so fuckin' AC/DC, we just said, 'We gotta have one of them on the album,'aven't we?' It'll be great live. It's a total live song.

In addition to the tracks already mentioned, Noel also played lead guitar on Little James, Gas Panic! and Sunday Morning Call. He split the lead guitar duties with Paul Stacey on the closing track, Roll It Over. "The best lead guitar bit on the whole record is Paul's solo on Roll It Over, he says. "It's the last bit,the one that sounds like Free. And I didn't play that 'cuz I haven't got a beard yet. It's a real 50-year-old's guitar solo."